T. Rex Skeleton Headed for Smithsonian

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The Smithsonian is finally set to welcome a T. rex into
its hallowed halls.

In October, one of the rare near-complete skeletons of the
dinosaur will be hauled from Montana to Washington, D.C., where
the fossil will be displayed in the National Museum of Natural
History as part of a 50-year loan agreement, the Smithsonian
announced Thursday (June 27).

The specimen is known as the Wankel T. rex after Kathy
Wankel, a rancher who discovered the dinosaur's arm bones in
Montana's Fort Peck reservoir in 1988. [ See
Photos of the Wankel T. Rex ]

"She brought them to the museum to be identified, and I remember
our curator Jack Horner asking her 'Can you find this site
again?' because what she'd brought in were the first arm bones of
a T. rex ever found," Shelley McKamey, the director of
the Museum of the Rockies in Montana, told
Smithsonian Magazine.

Wankel's discovery was just the tip of the iceberg. In the
excavations that followed at Fort Peck, Horner and a field crew
found 80 to 85 percent of the dinosaur's skeleton, including the
skull, making it one of the most complete
Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found.

The skeleton, which measures 38 feet (11.5 meters) long and
weighs 7 tons, was unearthed on federal land, and it belongs to
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. From 1990 to 2011, the Army
Corps loaned the fossil to the Museum of the Rockies at Montana
State University in Bozeman, where it was prepared and put on
display in its original "death pose." Under the new loan
agreement, the Smithsonian will get the Wankel T.
rex for 50 years.

The T. rex will be the centerpiece of the museum's new
dinosaur hall,
which is scheduled to open on the National Mall in 2019 and will
feature other key specimens from the Smithsonian's collection of
46 million fossils.

"We're thrilled to welcome this extraordinary fossil to the
Smithsonian," Kirk Johnson, director of the National Museum of
Natural History, said in a statement, adding that the move will
make the Wankel T. rex will be "the most viewed
T.rex fossil in the world." The museum has more than 7
million visitors annually, according to the Smithsonian.

T. rex, which roamed North America some 68 million to 66
million years ago, was one of the largest known carnivorous
dinosaurs and one of the last non-avian dinosaurs to exist prior
to the
Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Fossil hunter Barnum
Brown found the first T. rex bones in Montana in 1902 at
the Hell Creek Formation.